K.Mandla's blog of Linux experiences

Light and efficient, at under 10Kb

One thing I’ve been wanting to mention for a while was a teeny-weeny text editor called e3 that I noticed a month or two ago, after seeing it on the Lightweight Linux blog. e3 takes the unusual step of offering a smattering of distinct keyboard commands all patterned after other editors, including bigshots like WordStar, Vim and Nedit.

So why not use one of those others instead? Because e3 is miniscule by comparison, with a code size under 10Kb, if Wikipedia is to be believed. But aside from that point and from the few documents you get when you download the source, there’s not much to be said about the software. Even the home page might be the sparest ever created.

All the same, if you prefer keystrokes and commands unique to one particular program, but need a very, very slim editor, this might be the one you’re looking for. At some point I’m going to use it on the Pentium because it’s an obvious choice. Unfortunately it lacks the option to screen-wrap in the manner of a word processor, which I happen to prefer.

And as a side note, if you haven’t taken a look at the Lightweight Linux blog, you’re missing out. Lots of useful stuff appears, particularly if you’re one of those people who needs to run exceptionally … lightweight.🙄

It’s easy enough to see if its code size is 10K, no need for any “if Wikipedia is to be believed…” FUD. Go to the e3 site, download the tarball, and ls -lh will tell you all you need to know. The code is quite a bit larger than 10K, though the 32-bit Linux binary is 13K. I didn’t look at all of the binaries, but the 16 bit DOS binary might be 10K, but it is more limited in features.